Business Value

Industry Focus

Environmental services

Size

Serves more than 20 million customers

Based in Houston, Texas, Waste Management is a leader in environmental
solutions. The company provides end-to-end waste disposal services, from trash
collection and treatment to recycling and composting. Through its subsidiary
Wheelabrator Technologies Inc., Waste Management has created industry-leading
processes for producing clean energy from the waste stream. It operates more
than 1,200 recycling facilities, transfer stations, landfills and
waste-to-energy plants, 22 call centers and a fleet of 20,000 garbage and
recycling trucks.

Situation

Having grown through acquisition, Waste Management lacked a standardized IT
infrastructure across its hundreds of sites—some of which housed only a handful
of employees. Network inconsistency slowed daily business processes, hampered
customer service and increased upkeep costs. While busy solving network
problems, the Waste Management IT team was hampered in implementing the
company’s innovative growth ideas. The company needed to put technology at the
center of its strategic business plan.

Solution

Waste Management decided to update its network infrastructure and chose to
work with AT&T. The AT&T Network
Sourcing and Waste Management network design teams helped design and
implement a full-service solution. An AT&T Virtual Private Network
increased network capacity and standardized capabilities across locations.
AT&T implemented a hosted Voice over IP (VoIP)
solution called Voice
DNA® to run voice communication for smaller sites and provided them with a
range of options to meet their specific needs. The solution is fully managed by
AT&T, so the Waste Management IT team can focus resources on business
growth.

The Business of Transformation

Most people stop thinking about their garbage the moment they put it out on
the curb for pick-up. But for Waste Management, that’s when the thinking
begins. A leader in waste disposal, Waste Management serves more than 20
million residential, commercial and industrial customers in the U.S., Canada,
and Puerto Rico, providing a wide range of refuse-related services. With more
than 100 years of experience, Waste Management knows there’s a lot more to
trash than people might imagine.

The speed and the time to execute
the transition have been greatly simplified.”

For starters, Waste Management is helping make garbage green. As North
America’s largest residential recycler, the company is a leader in a changing
industry. In addition to traditional waste collection and disposal, Waste
Management’s services include organic composting, single-stream recycling and
electronics recycling. The company’s solutions help customers move towards
greener processes, even zero waste.

For Waste Management, what used to be just garbage is now a resource. “We
look at waste as material,” said Puneet Bhasin, Chief Information Officer. “We
want to extract as much value out of that supply chain as we can.”

Through subsidiary Wheelabrator Technologies Inc., Waste Management owns and
operates 17 waste-to-energy facilities, five independent power production
plants and 115 landfill-gas-to-energy production facilities. Using innovative
processes to extract energy from the gases released during decomposition, these
sites produce enough clean electricity to power 900,000 homes. And Waste
Management practices what it preaches. The company operates one of the nation’s
largest fleets of heavy-duty trucks powered by natural gas.

Held Back

Waste Management was ready for more growth, but its outdated IT
infrastructure was not. “The network was in the Jurassic days with frame relay,
56K capacity issues and availability and scalability problems,” said Gautam
Roy, Vice President Infrastructure, Operations and Technical Support. “The
situation was very bleak.” Growth through acquisition had left Waste Management
with a piecemeal infrastructure. And site conditions varied widely. Larger
sites employed up to 250 people while small locations might just have a few. At
some more remote locations, even basic cabling was a problem. Yet regardless of
size or setting, all needed the same capabilities.

Network problems compromised Waste Management’s ability to provide
consistent, high quality service – a company priority. Due to unpredictable
downtime and inadequate network capacity, even fundamental business
applications were slow. “Data entry, account retrieval and delivery
confirmation were taking a long time,” explained Roy. Communication connecting
drivers and facilities, customers and call centers was unreliable. “Servicing
the customer was painful.”

In addition, without sufficient bandwidth or an efficient way to manage
network traffic, Waste Management couldn’t maximize the value-added
applications needed to implement innovations. “With such deficient technology,
optimization to become efficient and effective goes down the tubes,” said
Roy.

Building a new, all-inclusive network from the foundation up would be a
major undertaking. “Putting a network in New York is very different from
putting one where there are only 15 people at a remote, out-of-the-way
location,” said Roy. Achieving business-wide upgrades and standardization would
require site-by-site implementation. Cost and time were both concerns. “We
didn’t have five years to pull this together,” Roy said. “I wanted to move in a
very short time at reasonable cost to an environment that mimics the world’s
best.”

Laying a New Foundation

Transforming the Waste Management IT infrastructure was no easy task. The
overhaul would include network updates, new call center technology and a
different management strategy. “It required an entire ecosystem of partners to
provide an end-to-end solution,” said Roy. Waste Management chose AT&T, an
existing wireline provider, to join in the project. From design to
implementation, AT&T was there to help. First, to be sure where it was
going, Waste Management needed to know what was in place. AT&T completed
thorough site audits to document the existing services and equipment.

Together the two companies designed a new IT environment with a managed
AT&T virtual private network as the foundation. The Multiprotocol Label
Switching (MPLS)-based VPN provides class of service capability to prioritize
network traffic.

Its smaller locations make up about 80 percent of the total sites. Here
AT&T offers a choice of three classes of IP Telephony arrangements with
AT&T Voice DNA. This hosted VoIP solution serves as the vehicle to deliver
such capabilities as voice mail and call screening and enables the sites to
choose the level of support that they require. The AT&T services are
bundled into a monthly price, making the network upgrade an operational cost
instead of a capital expense that is born by regional business units.

Since this would be a transformational project, Waste Management created a
system of governance and set of processes that would provide structure, enable
program oversight and ensure appropriate communications. These standards,
policies and procedures were then enhanced and fine-tuned as needed during the
program’s implementation.

Waste Management met its project goals, with AT&T there every step of
the way. The implementation was completed on time. “We did it in record pace,
with minimal disruption to our business operations,” said Roy.

Reducing Technology Waste

The VPN enables Waste Management to provide consistent, reliable service
across its locations. “Standardization brought a lot of benefits. It
instantaneously made things more stable, faster and easier to troubleshoot,”
said Roy. Uptime has increased, enabling operational efficiency and keeping
communication flowing. The network’s class of service capability provides
scalable bandwidth that’s easily allocated to ensure high priority applications
run smoothly.

Waste Management has added multiple value-added applications, including a
comprehensive web-based customer service system (providing 24/7/365 online
service and support across the globe), order-to-cash (OTC) processes, logistics
and routing applications, self-service functions and on-board truck
diagnostics. All were designed to boost efficiency and improve the customer
experience. These enhancements would have been impossible without the network
transformation. As more services move online, scalable bandwidth that the
solution provides will become even more important.

With the infrastructure upgrade, services are streamlined to reduce excess
costs. With voice moving over the data network, Waste Management is able to
operate more efficiently. Under the old phone system, the stacking of services,
such as forwarding local calls to toll-free numbers, was costly. Running over
the global AT&T IP network, SIP Trunking with IP Flexible Reach bypasses
those fees. “We are doing a great job in cost containment,” said Roy. “Our
overall free cash flow and our SG&A costs have improved over the past
couple of quarters. Transformational projects like this certainly contribute to
the strategy.”

In addition, the fact that AT&T delivers some capabilities as managed
services saves Waste Management’s valuable resources. Through Network Sourcing,
the AT&T team handles the day-to-day network performance management and
maintenance.

”Network care needs to be constant,” said Roy. “We need to make sure the
configurations are consistent across the routers and switches and that the
software versions and hardware versions are up to speed. With 1,200 or so sites
so it would have taken an army for us to do that.” With AT&T managing the
network, the Waste Management IT staff can concentrate on core strategies, not
on daily maintenance. The managed network is hosted at AT&T data centers,
increasing Waste Management’s infrastructure security.

‘Predictably Deliver Value’

Waste Management now has the platform it needs to increase efficiency while
supporting its growth and business strategy. “We are decreasing the number of
call centers because our network is stable and solid,” said Roy. Fewer call
centers does not mean less service. The new call system automatically routes
calls to the next available agent. Waste Management keeps its local feel by
routing local phone numbers through IP Flexible Reach. It can easily add new
lines, numbers and employees.

A key application the new network supports is OCS—the onboard computer
systems placed in Waste Management trucks. “We capture all kinds of data when
we service a customer—when we are there, when we leave and, the duration of our
stay,” said Roy. “The goal is to be effective, efficient and optimize our
operations while reducing the cost of doing business. Having computers and
software on the trucks to best serve our customers is a very critical
transformational program."

Other network-enabled applications include Order to Cash, which links the
Waste Management customer relationship management system used in call centers
with other business process applications, such as billing and operations. The
VPN is critical to the proper routing of all of this data.

Waste Management’s capabilities have come a long way from slow computers and
telephone busy signals. "We have leapfrogged a few generations of technology,
into a place where we can predictably deliver value to our customer,” said
Roy.

Flexibility and Efficiency

The highly available, flexible network also facilitates a key Waste
Management strategy: growing through acquisition. The recent purchase of a U.S.
recycler shows the advantages. “The integration of this business with this
network has been extremely simplified,” Roy said. “Instead of a point to point
link, we are taking the new locations to the cloud where they are connected
back to our data centers. The speed and the time to execute the transition have
been greatly simplified.”

With the right technology, Waste Management is moving ahead with
industry-leading innovations. One is a Machine-to-Machine
(M2M) solution for monitoring compactor capacity. Smart monitors sense when
trash compactors are nearing capacity and alert Waste Management through the
AT&T wireless network. Waste Management can then proactively reach out to
the customer to update the pick-up schedule. That means better service for
customers and better business for Waste Management.

The updated infrastructure provides the foundation for enhanced operations
and delivers “a lot more precision,” Roy said. “We are making the most accurate
decisions based on real-time changes and information. We are identifying
profitable customers, pinpointing waste in our system and ensuring that we are
very effective and efficient in our operation.”

‘A Reflection of the Relationship’

At the heart of the achievement is a fruitful relationship between Waste
Management and the AT&T team. For Roy, several aspects stand out. “AT&T
comprehends our needs, aligns their products and services to best fit them, and
offers flexible pricing to align to our current and future needs. These three
things are very critical.

“It started out with data for all sites and voice to our small sites,” he
added. “Since then we have added Canada and other international locations such
as India. The network has grown. It’s a reflection of the relationship and of
what AT&T has done to strengthen our belief in this partnership.”